Niall Toner Returns To The Fray With New Project Strand And A Marvellous New Album, Can't Trust The Rain. Pat Carty Catches Up.

“In 1987 we were doing Midnight At The Olympia and Rory Gallagher was doing five nights there. I said to my old man ‘you must know Rory from Cork!’ and he went, ‘yeah, I know Donal, a bit.’”, Niall Toner is deep in a smiling reverie, remembering his time in the honky-tonk collective Hank Halfhead & The Rambling Turkeys with his father, celebrated bluegrass man Niall Toner, Sr. “So we meet Rory, in Bloom’s, and asked if there was any chance he’d hang around and come on, and he did! He played four or five songs, I think he sang ‘Close Up The Honky Tonks’ – not only did he sing it, he loved it! One minute we were playing a bar in Dorset Street, the next we’re in the Olympia, the place is full, and Rory Gallagher is on stage with us! Being so fucking young I thought, well this is it, this is how it works! Van Morrison was at the side of the stage at one of those gigs too, but he wouldn’t come out. Then we supported Johnny Cash on an Irish tour and we also got booked to play Adam Clayton’s twenty-fifth birthday party – this was in The Factory on Barrow Street. This was our U2 moment. They got up and sang, I can’t remember what, but it was well rehearsed!” They’re a very professional outfit. “They are!”

Hot Press is sharing a glass with Toner to discuss his current incarnation as the main man in Strand, and their very fine debut release, Can’t Trust The Rain, with which he is justifiably delighted. “I really am, I’m so fucking proud of this, you have no idea.” It’s his first step back into the fray since 2012’s Paraphernalia Boutique, with Johnny Rowen in The Lofires. “I really like that record but I wanted to do something more robust with electric guitars and drums” is the way Toner sees it. “Les Keye and I tried to get a band together, that didn’t work out, so out of frustration we booked a recording session. But it wasn’t until six months after that – this is 2016 – that I thought “this feels like it’s a record” We went into Les’s Arad Studio in Summerhill for three days. It’s mostly first or second take stuff. Some of the songs I had already, some were hurriedly put together and few were dragged out of the scrap yard. Mind you, I had a load of help with arrangements from Les and Duncan Maitland.”

Tracks like the gorgeous ‘No Underground’ are deliberately old fashioned, and all the better for it. “Some of the songs have that very nostalgic feel, think of this record as a space ship that landed in about 1971, and we got out and said ‘Yeah!’” This old school approach extends to streaming services being deliberatelyNiall Toneru2 avoided. “It’s kind of an experiment I suppose, that approach really feels to me like you’re giving it away. Roger McGuinn said he had 247,000 plays of ‘Eight Miles High’ and he got about $72 – I can’t see how that works, it still costs money to make records. The advice to bands now is sell merchandise which seems kind of paltry to me. I just want to see who really wants it – people say they can’t find it but have they been to Tower Records? This just always felt like a record and I feel it works best that way. We tried to make it sound as analogue as possible and I think we succeeded.”

There’s a stylistic link stretching from Can’t Trust The Rain all the way back to Toner’s stint with The Dixons, one of the better Irish bands - seek out their brilliant ‘Ingrid Bergman’ as evidence - of the late eighties/early nineties. Is he still listening to those same records? “They’re all still there, like the Byrds Notorious Byrd Brothers, I found a library copy at home because my Da was working for RTE. There’s a bit of Beefheart, Bowie’s in there, Teenage Fanclub, especially the sound of their Songs From Northern Britain although I didn’t get Big Star until later on, that probably came through Stars of Heaven, I was a big fan - Stax and Southern soul, Neil Young, Exile On Main St, even Country Joe & The Fish!”

“I’d certainly have a fondness for the relationships” says Toner when pushed about The Dixons. “I think getting into a band was a way around social anxiety, a way to interact with the world without freezing up, not that I knew any of that at the time.” Join a band, meet girls? “Pretty much. Getting back together now and again is fun but you can see why we didn’t continue with it.”

The first Dixons’ single, 89’s ‘I Have Fun’, was released on U2’s Mother Records, although that was always going to be a temporary state of affairs. “I remember some sort of record contract was produced. Our management took it to a lawyer who said “don’t sign that, get them to sign this instead!” There were some ridiculous demands for this that and the other, and they, Mother, just rightly said “Ah, here!”

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Toner’s slightly older and slightly wiser now, but he still can’t keep away “There’s a strange compulsion there, in a way it helps to quiet the constant noise, the constant scratching at the back of my head. I can’t not do it” he concedes. “This record is a huge success, personally, although I have to hand it to Les, who wouldn’t let me drop the ball. I’d love a bit more time - in between making mash potato at home or whatever - and energy, but this is a good place to be. I can’t find a better thing to be doing standing on two feet.”